Two giants lead Africa's mining agenda

Botswana and Ghana have become emblematic of policies and strategies designed to strengthen the mining industry by building national participation, diversifying away from historically dominant commodities and improving regulatory coherence

- Thuso Tseetse and Reindolf Ofosu-Hene

It is often said that Africa holds close to a third of the world's known reserves of the minerals essential to the energy transition and to emerging industrial technologies.

The figure appears so frequently in policy papers and investor decks that it has become almost rhetorical, a shorthand for potential rather than a measure of realised strategy. But that is beginning to shift, at least at a discernibly faster pace.

Over the past year, policymakers across several of the continent's major producers have advanced new mining frameworks built around local content and domestic participation. The aim is to draw processing and manufacturing capacity closer to the resource, creating beneficiation within national economies and attracting investment into the wider mining ecosystem rather than into extraction alone.

The direction has been welcomed by those who see it as a long-overdue alignment between resource ownership and national development. It remains important to attract capital and create a friendly investor environment for mining and capital-intensive projects.

Countries like Botswana and Ghana have become emblematic of policies and strategies designed to strengthen the mining industry by building national participation, diversifying away from historically dominant commodities and improving regulatory coherence.

Botswana, for example, is actively diversifying its mining sector beyond diamonds, largely in response to sustained headwinds in the diamond market.

Diamonds still dominate the economy - accounting for about 80% of export earnings, one-third of fiscal revenue and roughly a quarter of GDP-making Botswana the world's largest diamond producer by value.

But policy and investment attention are now shifting toward critical minerals such as copper, nickel, soda ash, salt, manganese, lithium, uranium and gold, driven by global demand for clean-energy inputs.